The seat saga continues.
At this point in the build, I have everything under control except for the front seat, but I think we are finally making progress.
When I bought my original car from Josephblues, Mona, had a tan power bench seat in it. It was pretty rough but the power tracks mostly worked and it was overall fairly complete.
Had I been thinking clearly, I would have just used this seat, cleaned it up and had it re upholstered and been done with it.
A little over a year ago I stumbled upon a clean 76 Royal that was being parted out and it had spectacular seats in it. However, the front bench was not the proper style. The seller offered me the entire interior at a fantastic price but the only catch was I had to leave him with a front seat for the derby. So it was either leave him the 76 royal seat or take it and leave him my 74 power bench. My decision was to swap him seats. I later regretted this decision but the 76 was in such good shape.
The seat was complete, good upholstery, good springs, good non power tracks, not a spec of rust on the frame anywhere. my original thinking was to just dye the maroon seats and bolt it in.
After spending some time dying the other interior parts I came to the decision the dye was not a good long term solution to achieve a tan seat.
I took the 76 seats to my upholstery guy, he was happy with the condition of the seats but in reality duplicating the panels, patterns, pleats and armrests of the 76 was going to labor intense and thus very expensive. I'm not opposed to spending money on quality work but I could have bought a whole complete Royal or two for what we were looking at getting into! Even then it would STILL be the wrong style seat!
Now wishing I have kept my rough 74 bench we set out to find another seat. I think a decent, basic, cop type bench seat is about as elusive as a 74 front bumper. I searched cross country, called multiple salvage yards. Found plenty of seats like my 76 seat, found split benches, also found a lot of what was listed on car-part.com was actually out of B body Monacos.
Getting desperate, last weekend we returned to a salvage yard that I knew had 3 C body's to see what they had. 2 Furys and a 74 Monaco.
These are pics I took what I was there 2 years ago.
This time there was 8'in of snow on the ground. After trudging around for an hour to find these gems again, we found all 3 of the seat candidates to be in equally terrible shape. In the end we took the Monaco seat mainly because it had already been previously unbolted and the doors were rusted shut on the two Furys. Not to mention the green Fury was blocked in and had substantial collision damage to the B pillar that I had not noticed before. Actually looked like it started to crush the seat on the passenger side.
After forcing the passenger door open on the Monaco we drug this jewel out.
Its in bad shape but kind of cool because it has the cop spec fat guy HD springs in the bottom of the seat.
So I hauled this new find to my upholstery guy this week and he says "Don't worry I've seen worse"
We agree on a plan to tear both seats down and see if we can somehow install the 74 cop car seat back onto the nice 76 seat bottom and tracks. Sounds great!
Next morning I get a call "Remember how I told you I've seen worse" umm yeah, he tells me its ate up pretty bad, the worst he's ever seen...... He tells me that he thinks it could be saved but its going to take some work.
When I picked up my new hybrid, rusty seat this is what I had.
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The years of sitting in the elements had not been kind. The whole upper support had rotted out, and the head rest supports were gone.
Not being discouraged, my metal guy went to work.
Between sourcing some new material and salvaging pieces from the 76 seat backs this is what we did.
All said and done, not too shabby.
Even added some captured nuts to the lower frame to support the 74 back
I am extremely pleased with the results.
Going to drop it back off to the upholstery guy today, we will see what he has to say.